Frederick C. Beiser

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main…

— Frederick C. Beiser

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards;…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

— Frederick C. Beiser

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no…

— Frederick C. Beiser

Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life.

— Frederick C. Beiser

All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.

— Frederick C. Beiser

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

— Frederick C. Beiser

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

— Frederick C. Beiser

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the…

— Frederick C. Beiser

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental…

— Frederick C. Beiser

That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.

— Frederick C. Beiser

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at…

— Frederick C. Beiser

Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

— Frederick C. Beiser

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an…

— Frederick C. Beiser

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others…

— Frederick C. Beiser

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite,…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we…

— Frederick C. Beiser

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and…

— Frederick C. Beiser

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of…

— Frederick C. Beiser

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense…

— Frederick C. Beiser